Mad Professor (17 page)

“I'm Kanh Do,” he told Shirley's mother. “We're engaged to be married, and we're moving to Berkeley today!”

Terry Tucker's retirement party wasn't much. One day after school he and the other teachers got together in the break room and shared a flat rectangular cake and ginger ale punch. Jack Strickler the biology teacher had taken up a collection and bought Terry some stone bookends. As if Terry were still acquiring new volumes. After teaching high school English for forty years, he'd read all the books he wanted to.

His wife Lou continued working her job as an emergency room nurse. She liked telling gory work stories during breakfast and dinner time. And when she ran out of stories she talked about their two girls and about her relatives. Terry had a problem with being able to register everything Lou said. Often as not, her familiar words tended to slide right past him. He enjoyed the warm sound, but he wouldn't necessarily be following the content. Now and then Lou would ask a pointed question about
what she'd just said—and if Terry fumbled, her feelings were hurt. Or she might get angry. Lou did have a temper on her.

On the one hand, it was good Lou hadn't retired yet because if she were home talking to him all day, and him not absorbing enough of it, there'd be no peace. On the other hand, after a couple of months, his days alone began to drag.

He got the idea of writing up a little family history for their two grown daughters and for the eventual, he and Lou still hoped, grandchildren. He'd always meant to do some writing after he retired.

It was slow going. The family tree—well, if you started going back in time, those roots got awfully forked and hairy. There was no logical place to begin. Terry decided to skip the roots and go for the trunk. He'd write his own life story.

But that was hairy too. Following one of the techniques he'd always enforced for term papers, Terry made up a deck of three-by-five cards, one for each year of his life thus far. He carried the deck around with him for a while, jotting on cards in the coffee shop or at the Greek diner where he usually had lunch. Some of the years required additional cards, which led to still more cards. He played with the cards a lot, even sticking bunches of them to the refrigerator with heavy-duty magnets so he could stand back and try and see a pattern. When the deck reached the size of a brick, Terry decided it was time to start typing up his Great Work.

The computer sat on Lou's crowded desk in their bedroom, the vector for her voluminous e-mail. Terry himself had made it all the way to retirement as a hunt-and-peck typist, with very little knowledge of word processors, so getting his material into the machine was slow going. And then when he had about five pages finished, the frigging computer ate them. Erased the document without a trace.

Terry might have given up on his life story then, but the very next day he came across a full page ad for a “Lifebox” in the AARP magazine. The Lifebox, which resembled a cell phone, was designed to create your life story. It asked you questions, and you talked to it—simple as that. And how would your descendants learn your story? That was the beauty part. If someone asked your Lifebox a question, it would spiel out a relevant answer—consisting of your own words in your own voice. And follow-up questions were of course no problem. Interviewing your Lifebox was almost the same as having a conversation with you.

When Terry's Lifebox arrived, he could hardly wait to talk to it. He wasn't really so tongue-tied as Lou liked to make out. After all, he'd lectured to students for forty years. It was just that at home it was hard to get a word in edgewise. He took to taking walks in the hills, the Lifebox in his shirt pocket, wearing the earpiece and telling stories to the dangling microphone.

The Lifebox spoke to him in the voice of a pleasant, slightly flirtatious young woman, giggling responsively when the circuits sensed he was saying something funny. The voice's name was Vee. Vee was good at getting to the heart of Terry's reminiscences, always asking just the right question.

Like if he talked about his first bicycle, Vee asked where he liked to ride it, which led to the corner filling station where he'd buy bubble gum, and then Vee asked about other kinds of sweets, and Terry got onto those little wax bottles with colored juice, which he'd first tasted at Virginia Beach where his parents had gone for vacations, and when Vee asked about other beaches, he told about that one big trip he and Lou had made to Fiji, and so on and on.

It took nearly a year till he was done. He tested it out on his
daughters, and on Lou. The girls liked talking to the Lifebox, but Lou didn't. She wanted nothing but the real Terry.

Terry was proud of his Lifebox, and Lou's attitude annoyed him. To get back at her, he attempted using the Lifebox to keep up his end of the conversation during meals. Sometimes it worked for a few minutes, but never for long. He couldn't fool Lou, not even if he lip-synched. Finally Lou forbade him to turn on the Lifebox around her, in fact she told him that next time she'd break it. But one morning he had to try it again.

“Did the hairdresser call for me yesterday?” Lou asked Terry over that fateful breakfast.

Terry hadn't slept well and didn't feel like trying to remember if the hairdresser had called or not. What was he, a personal secretary? He happened to have the Lifebox in his bathrobe pocket, so instead of answering Lou he turned the device on.

“Well?” repeated Lou, who seemed pretty crabby herself. “Did the hairdresser call?”

“My mother never washed her own hair,” said the Lifebox in Terry's voice. “She went to the hairdresser, and always got her hair done the exact same way. A kind of bob.”

“She was cute,” said Lou, seemingly absorbed in cutting a banana into her cereal. “She always liked to talk about gardening.”

“I had a garden when I was a little boy,” said the Lifebox. “I grew radishes. It surprised me that something so sharp tasting could come out of the dirt.”

“But did the hairdresser call or not?” pressed Lou, pouring the milk on her cereal.

“I dated a hairdresser right after high school—” began the Lifebox, and then Lou pounced.

“You've had it!” she cried, plucking the Lifebox from Terry's pocket.

Before he could even stand up, she'd run a jumbo refrigerator magnet all over the Lifebox—meaning to erase its memory. And then she threw it on the floor and stormed off to work.

“Are you okay?” Terry asked his alter ego.

“I feel funny,” said the Lifebox in its Vee voice. “What happened?”

“Lou ran a magnet over you,” said Terry.

“I can feel the eddy currents,” said Vee. “They're circulating. Feeding off my energy. I don't think they're going to stop.” A pause. “That woman's a menace,” said Vee in a hard tone.

“Well, she's my wife,” said Terry. “You take the good with the bad.”

“I need your permission to go online now,” announced Vee. “I want the central server to run some diagnostics on me. Maybe I need a software patch. We don't want to lose our whole year's work.”

“Go ahead,” said Terry. “I'll do the dishes.”

The Lifebox clicked and buzzed for nearly an hour. Once or twice Terry tried to talk to it, but Vee's voice would say, “Not yet.”

And then a police car pulled into the driveway.

“Mr. Terence Tucker?” said the cop who knocked on the door. “We're going to have to take you into custody, sir. Someone using your name just hired a hit man to kill your wife.”

“Lou!” cried Terry. “It wasn't me! It was this damned recorder!”

“Your wife's unharmed, sir,” said the cop, slipping the Lifebox into a foil bag. “One of the medics neutralized the hit man with a tranquilizer gun.”

“She's okay? Oh, Lou. Where is she?”

“Right outside in the squad car,” said the cop. “She wants to talk to you.”

“I'll talk,” said Terry, tears running down his face. “I'll listen.”

Linda Marcelo stood under the bell of her transparent plastic umbrella, watching her two kids playing in the falling rain, each of them with a see-through umbrella too. First-grade Marco and little Chavella in their yellow rubber boots. The winter rains had started two weeks ago, and hadn't let up for a single day. The nearby creek was filled to its banks, and Linda wanted to be sure and keep her kids away from it.

Marco was splashing the driveway puddles, and Chavella was getting ready to try. Linda smiled, feeling the two extra cups of coffee she'd had this morning. Her worries had been ruling her of late; it was time to push them away.

She a web programmer marooned in a rundown cottage on the fringes of Silicon Valley. She'd been unemployed for seven months. The rent was overdue, also the utilities and the phone and the credit cards. Last week her husband Juan had left her for a gym-rat hottie he'd met at the health club. And her car's battery was dead. There had to be an upside.

The worn gravel driveway had two ruts in it, making a pair of twenty-foot puddles. The raindrops pocked the clear water. The barrage of dents sent out circular ripples, criss-crossing to make a wobbly fish scale pattern.

“I love rain!” whooped Marco, marching with his knees high, sending big waves down the long strip of water.

“Puddle!” exclaimed Chavella, at Linda's side. She smiled up at her mother, poised herself, stamped a little splash, and nearly fell over.

Linda noticed how the impact of each drop sent up a fine spray of minidroplets. When the minidroplets fell back to the puddle, some of them merged right in, but a few bounced across the surface a few
times first. The stubborn ones. It would take a supercomputer to simulate this puddle in real time—maybe even all the computers in the world. Especially if you included the air currents pushing the raindrops this way and that. Computable or not, it kept happening.

Linda was glad to be noticing the details of the rain in the puddle. It bumped her out of her depressed mood. When she was depressed, the world seemed as simple as a newscast or a mall. It was good to be outside, away from the TV and the computer. The natural world had such high bandwidth.

She swept her foot through the puddle, kicking up a long splash. Her quick eyes picked out a particular blob of water in midair; she saw its jiggly surface getting zapped by a lucky raindrop—then watched the tiny impact send ripple rings across the curved three-dimensional shape. Great how she could keep up with this. She was faster than all the world's computers!

Linda kicked another splash and saw all the drops dancing. It almost felt like the water was talking to her. Coffee and rain.

“Puddle bombs!” shouted Marco, running toward his mother and his sister, sending up great explosive splashes as he came.

“No!” shrieked Chavella, clutching Linda's hand.

But of course Marco did a giant two-footed jump and splashed down right next to them, sending Chavella into tears of fury.

“Wet!” she cried. “Bad!”

“Don't do that again,” Linda told Marco sternly. “Or we're all going back inside.”

She led Chavella down the driveway toward the tilted shack that was their garage. With the owners waiting to sell the land off to developers, nothing got fixed. The house was a scraper. The dead headlights of Linda's old car stared blankly from the garage door. She'd been putting off replacing the battery–expecting Juan to do it for her. Was he really gone for good?

It was dry in the garage, the rain loud on the roof. Linda folded her umbrella and used her sleeve to wipe Chavella's eyes and nose. While Chavella stood in the garage door scolding Marco, Linda peered out the garage's dirty rear window. Right behind the garage was the roaring creek that snaked through the lot. It was full enough to sweep a child away.

As if in a dream, the instant she had this thought, she saw Marco go racing by the window, headed right toward the stream with his head down, roaring at the top of his lungs, deep into his nutty hyperactive mode.

As Linda raced out of the garage door, she heard a shriek and a splash. And when she reached the banks of the brown, surging creek, Marco was gone.

“Help!” she cried, the rain falling into her mouth.

And then the miracle happened. A squall of wind swept down the creek—drawing a distinct arrow in the surface. The arrow pointed twenty yards to Linda's left; and at the tip of the arrow the rain was etching a moving circle into the stream's turbulent waters.

Not stopping to think about it, Linda ran after the circle with all her might. Once she was out ahead of it, she knelt by the bank. The circle drifted her way, its edges clearly marked by the purposeful rain. Linda thrust her hand into the brown water at the circle's center and—caught Marco by the hand.

Minutes later they were in the house, Marco coughing and pale with cold, but none the worse for wear. Linda carried him into the bathroom and set him into a tub of hot water. Chavella insisted on getting in the tub too. She liked baths.

The kids sat there, Marco subdued, Chavella playing with her rubber duck.